Poetry for Historians: Or, W.H. Auden and History by Carolyn Steedman

Poetry for Historians: Or, W.H. Auden and History by Carolyn Steedman

Author:Carolyn Steedman [Steedman, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526125217
Google: bFG1yAEACAAJ
Publisher: ManchesterUP
Published: 2018-09-15T21:47:25+00:00


6

Caesura: a worker reads history and a historian writes poetry

(caesura: a break or sense pause, usually near the middle of a verse, marked in scansion by a double line: //)

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

The books are filled with names of kings.

Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

… Every ten years a great man,

Who paid the piper?

… So many questions.1

Students of history are routinely advised about the uses of literature – not at length; but they are advised – as in John Tosh’s guide to historical theory and method, The Pursuit of History. When treating literature as historical source material, he says, it is obvious that ‘novels and plays cannot … be treated as factual reports … Nor, needless to say, do historical novels – or Shakespeare’s history plays for that matter – carry any authority as historical statements about the periods to which they refer.’2 Nevertheless, creative literature is valuable for the insight it offers into a writer’s intellectual and social context; the popularity of authors in the past and the longevity of their work may be because they successfully articulated ‘the values and preoccupations of literary contemporaries’. This knowledge is deemed useful to the young or aspiring historian. There is no account of form or style as constituting historical evidence in these recommendations, though in the early days of the journal Literature and History, inaugurated to explore the relationship between the two disciplines, there were valiant attempts explore ‘literature’ as a type of documentary evidence. Sometimes these explorations could only tell the story of the historical profession growing suspicious of literature during the nineteenth century. Literary scholars pointed yet again to historians’ sad incapacities: we almost always respond to ‘a formal discourse which expresses directly or indirectly the values, ideology, or socio-psychological tensions of a given society’; we are ‘unable to come to grips with the past as it is embodied in the … language and structure … of a piece of literature’; we restrict ourselves to the ‘content or surface meaning’ of whatever text we use. In short, historians are not very good at using the evidence of form and style.3

All of this was a long time ago of course (though in the same country). Search BBIH (Bibliography of British and Irish History On-line) and you will find many historians using poetry, fiction, hybrid-forms, letters, diaries, and autobiography as source material, in inventive and exhilarating ways. Not much attention to the forms of poetry though. The novel is an extraordinarily difficult – impossible – form to recruit for evidence, yet it is widely employed. When the epistolary form of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is used, there is perceived to be no problem at all, for the very structure dictated by the exchange of (fictional) letters, is both form and meaning itself. But the nineteenth-century novel is shaped to such a sagging and joyously disjointed scaffolding, that you could spend a lifetime and ten volumes accounting for the tone, rhythm, and organisation of just one of them, if you were to adduce structure to historical argument.



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